Jabbar Collins

In February 1994, Rabbi Abraham Pollack was shot and killed in a robbery as he collected rent in a building in Brooklyn, New York.

Police charged 20-year-old Jabbar Collins, who lived in a nearby housing project with the murder.

At trial in Kings County Supreme Court, prosecution witness Adrian Diaz testified that he saw Collins put a gun in his waistband as he fled the scene of the crime. A second witness, Angel Santos, said he was calling 911 when he saw Collins run past him. A third man, Edwin Oliva, told police that Collins had told him before the murder that he was planning to rob the Rabbi. The prosecutor denied that any of the witnesses had been offered anything for their testimony. In March 1995, a jury convicted Collins of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to 34-years-to-life.

After his conviction, Collins trained himself in legal proceedings, and filed record requests and appeals on his own behalf. Eventually, he uncovered a systematic pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct. In 2003, posing as a district attorney’s investigator who was trying to reconstruct lost information about the case, he called Diaz from prison. Diaz told him that before Collins’s trial he had violated his parole by going to Puerto Rico and could have been sent back to prison, but that the district attorney promised to make sure that would not happen if he testified against Collins.

In 2005, Collins contacted Oliva, who admitted that he only signed a statement implicating Collins in the murder after he himself was arrested for an unrelated robbery several weeks after the murder. Oliva said that he was threatened by detectives and that when he balked, his work-release status was revoked until he agreed to testify. Collins also found out that Oliva was allowed to plead to a lesser charge in the robbery case in exchange for his testimony against Collins.

In addition, Collins obtained the 911 tape for the incident and discovered that Santos had not called 911 as he testified at the trial. Santos later testified that at the time of the murder, he was using drugs "every day. Twenty-four hours." He said that as the murder trial neared a year later, he told the prosecutor he did not want to testify, but that the prosecutor threatened him with prosecution, then locked him up for a week as a material witness. When he agreed to testify, he said, he was taken from jail to a hotel and the prosecutor later claimed Santos was in protective custody.

After failing to obtain relief in state court, Collins filed a petition for habeas corpus in federal court, and asked for an order prohibiting retrial because of the extensive governmental misconduct. After a one-day evidentiary hearing, the Kings County District Attorney’s Office decided not to oppose that outcome, ostensibly because the prosecution witnesses were too compromised to retry the case; the office continued to maintain that Collins was guilty.

In June 2010, a United States District Court Judge vacated Collins’s murder conviction and dismissed the charges against him with prejudice. Collins, who went to work as a paralegal, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2011 seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction.

In July 2014, Collins settled the lawsuit against the State of New York for $3 million. In August 2014, Collins settled with the City of New York for $10 million.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

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